“Why, we’re going to The Senator.”
The Senator was an expensive supper club, a sophisticated jazz lounge. He led her up the stairs and through the door, and she let him hold her hand as if he were guiding her, certain that there was a grace in her stride because she had studied how all the models in the fashion films on television walked. She could see that he was pleased with her because he walked beside her with his shoulders squared, an almost stern and disdainful look in his eyes that might have frightened her if she hadn’t been so sure he was like this only because he wanted to have her.
The head waiter pointed to a side table, but Conrad took the waiter’s arm firmly and nodded to the front. “We’ll sit down by Mr. Jackson, thanks. He’ll be glad to see us…”
“But, sir…”
“No buts about it.”
“Sir —
“Thank you…”
Conrad, with a quick wave of his arm, almost as if he were directing traffic – which made her laugh gaily – led her through the close tables and then when they were seated he leaned across to her, before they ordered drinks, and said, “Today is my birthday.”
“Your birthday… Why didn’t you tell me… I should be taking you out… I don’t have anything for you.”
“You’re all I want,” he said, looking directly at her.
She put her head in her hands for a moment and let out a low, quiet wailing sound. He looked perplexed. “What was that?” he asked.
“That’s how I whistle in the dark,” she said, trying to laugh.
He looked very grave and she thought he was watching her as if he were trying to trace her thoughts. She sat back in her chair. The week before, he had told her that she had to make up her mind about their future, and had given her until his birthday to decide, but she was sure he hadn’t told her when his birthday was and hadn’t given it any thought at all. Only now, with the steadiness in his eyes, did she realize that he had been serious.
She pouted. It was ridiculous to suddenly thrust such a decision on her. How could she decide? They had been close, had had wonderful moments in which she’d felt both safe and free, and they’d made love several times, but he had never really talked about love. He had never said that he loved her though he had said one night that he valued her more than anything he had in the world. She had wanted to cry when he’d said that, but now she thought, He’s never said that he actually loves me, and she resented his restraint and his self-assurance. Well, she thought, when he mentions it, then we can talk it out.
J.J. Jackson, the pianist, came to their table. He greeted Conrad warmly, calling him Connie, and said, “You got yourself a fine-looking lady. Fine.” Conrad asked him to sit down, and before she could say tartly that she thought she had a fine-looking man, Jackson told her that he had met Conrad in night traffic court. He said he’d been charged with “something really stupid, entering into a left-turn lane when the light was already yellow, stopping and then turning against the red.” Conrad, who was waiting to argue his own traffic ticket, had suddenly offered to appear as a witness for him. “He was some kinda brilliant,” Jackson said. “He had that judge all turned around inside his head, with the time of this and the time of that, and how this and that were impossible. Finally, this here judge, he says, ‘How do you know all this?’ and he says, ‘Because I designed the whole system, Your Honour.’ I thought I’d laugh till I died at the look on that judge’s face.” Jackson smacked him hard on the back. “My main man,” he said. “My ace boon coon. Who then said to the judge, ‘I have my own ticket, Your Honour.’ But the judge he says, ‘Out. Forget it. No more.’” Conrad accepted this display of admiration and warmth with ease. He looked so satisfied that she wondered if he hadn’t seen Jackson’s wry smirk and wondered why he would let anyone smack him so hard on the back. When Jackson left, Conrad settled into his reserved aloof air, the back of his hand against his mouth. She reached out and touched his free hand that was flat on the table and he smiled again, looking directly at her, a silent resolve in his eyes.
She shrugged and said, “What’s it like being a boon coon?” and turned to enjoy the music, clapping enthusiastically after one of Jackson’s solos. The crowd around her was clapping loudly, too, so she put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. She was anxious that she might be acting like a young girl but it was the only way she felt she could maintain her sense of herself. So she whistled again and wanted to cry. She couldn’t understand why she wanted to cry and why he refused to say anything to her.
They left the lounge and walked home, taking the side streets that were quiet in the night. It had turned cool and she was shivering, yet she didn’t cuddle against him as they walked. She didn’t feel she could because he was walking with his hands in his pockets. He talked about baseball and a woman who was trying to swim across Lake Ontario for charity, for crippled children, and he seemed not only concerned about the children but quite content with her, but she knew he was not content and she thought he was not being honest, not being fair. She was angry and refused to walk all the way home in resigned silence.
“Would you like this to be our last night, Connie?”
“That’s up to you…”
“No, it’s not,” she said fiercely and wheeled away, but somehow she knew that if she said any more he would just smile at her. She knew she would never forgive him if he smiled at her in her rage. She remembered how he had smiled at her in The Senator, as if he were being patient with her. She was tempted to put two fingers in her mouth and whistle at him. Instead, she punched him on the arm. “You’re something else,” she said.
“And so are you.”
They stood at the bottom of the stairs to her veranda. He was suddenly talking to her again, as if they had not been silent almost all the way home, and he was talking about how he hoped to move out of traffic control into policy planning for the whole city. “But never into politics,” he said. “You just get your brains beaten in in politics and beaten in by any clunkhead who comes along.” He told her it took courage to plan the future, to go to the top. “That’s the way it is at city hall,” he said. “The politicians, the dorks who don’t know what they’re doing, they are on the ground floor, the planners are on the top floor.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek. Then, after a moment in which he held her hand, looking down as if he were meditative and shy, he said, “Goodnight, Marie-Claire…” and began to turn away.
“Connie…just a minute, Connie…”
There were tears in her eyes.
“Connie, don’t go away yet…”
He turned to her eagerly, expectantly, and she felt very young, very unknowing, beside him. He seemed to have counted on her calling out.
“Connie…”
He touched her cheek, as if his touch could help her out of her confusion, but she didn’t feel confused. She felt bullied by his silence. She wanted to slap his face and tell him he was pig-headed and arrogant. “I guess I’m just yellow,” she said.
“What?”
“Yellow.”
“There’s no need to be scared,” he said.
“Who said I’m scared? You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? You don’t know where the hell I’m coming from.”
She turned and walked calmly up the stairs and into the house, leaving him standing on the walk. For a moment, as she peeked through the lace curtains covering the small oval glass window in the door, she thought he was going to come up the stairs and her heart leapt, but he turned and walked across the street and stood against the cemetery wall. At first, she thought she could feel him willing her out of the house, to come to him, and she was afraid. Then, as she watched him stand for so long in the shadows with his back to the wall and his hand to his mouth, she thought he looked lonely and lost and she was sure he was waiting for her, as he had waited all night, because he couldn’t bring himself to cross the street, couldn’t say that he wanted her, couldn’t say that he loved her. She felt a sudden urge to comfort him, to go to
him and hold him and say, “You want to arm wrestle? Never mind, you win,” but then she thought with contempt, He’d be scared stiff if I ever took him off into the graveyard at night. She turned away from the door, shut off the hall light, and went into the kitchen, where her mother and father were having their bedtime cup of tea.
As she saw them sitting so quietly at the table, as they had sat for years, she felt more confident about her life, and yet she also felt ashamed that she had not been more of a friend to her mother and father in their home. She kissed her startled mother on the forehead and then, full of a strange new mellowness, she draped her arms around her father’s neck and said, “You’re right, it doesn’t work.”
“What?” he asked, astonished.
“The stop-and-go. It doesn’t work.”
She went upstairs to bed. She couldn’t wait to go to sleep and then wake in the morning to the call of the train whistle coming to her across the graveyard.
THE MUSCLE
Livio Scarpadello was late for school because of the morning walk he’d taken with his father, a long walk, and when they were in front of Settimio’s Café, where there were chrome coffee machines in the window, his father had insisted that they sit down at one of the small Arborite tables and have a thimble-cup of good strong espresso. He’d smiled and patted Livio’s hand as if it were the old days of bleaching morning sunlight in the village. Then they had hurried along the street to the dowdy red-brick school and at the door he’d said, “Livio, you listen, always listen to the teacher.”
His father had been a stonemason in the hills outside Taormina, and his father loved stone, the way it captured light and held it – “like life itself,” he said – speckled with colour and yet it could be a dead weight, almost as heavy as a dead body, except stones never sleep. Though the real secret of stone, he said, like the stone he’d cut for the village fountain, was when you held it to your ear. If you listened hard you could hear water, water locked in the stone. Livio always wondered why the village men sat hunched against the stone with their legs stretched out, never listening, not even to each other, as they laughed and joked and got quietly drunk on black wine in the early evening.
When Livio got to the classroom he hung back at the door, not because he was a little late but because Mr. Beale, the history teacher, always made him feel small and unimportant, made him feel like a stranger who could never belong in this new world. Yet it consoled him to know that all the students felt unimportant when Mr. Beale was teaching.
Today he was talking about Rome. He was a tall and easy-going man with a confident air who collected ancient glass bottles, which he sometimes brought to class so he could show the students how all the impurities in the once-clear glass had caused beautiful lace-like discolourations. He liked to amble back and forth in his tweed suit, talking in a rambling, authoritative way about history, and sometimes he would open his long arms wide as if he were offering his students all the wisdom in the world.
Livio hoped he could sneak into the room without catching Mr. Beale’s eye. He never wanted Mr. Beale to single him out again because the last time Livio was late Mr. Beale had said sarcastically, “Where did you come from?” as if he had never seen him before. “You don’t belong here, do you? Ah, you do, you do. I believe that’s true,” and all the students had laughed. Later, between classes, they had called out, “Where you from, Livio boy?”
But he hesitated too long at the door. Mr. Beale saw him and cried out, “Come in, come in, you’re among friends.” Someone at the back of the room snickered as Livio sat down, hunched forward, listening to Mr. Beale, who was suddenly standing in the light in front of the big window, opening his arms.
“Livio, you should know about this. I bet you know all about Rome and Carthage, yes? So, the great question is: Did the Romans make a mistake? Was it a mistake to wipe out Carthage?”
Livio looked up, wondering, a little wide-eyed, shaking his head.
“Carthage,” Mr. Beale repeated, dryly.
“Yes,” Livio said.
“Delenda est Carthago,” Mr. Beale said.
“Yes.”
“Was it a mistake, eh? Was it in their own interest to kill off their enemy forever?”
“No, Carthage no mistake,” Livio said, smiling.
“Wrong,” Mr. Beale said, turning away. “These things always seem so simple, but life’s complex, boys,” and he turned back to Livio for a moment with a wan smile and then went on to explain that the Romans should have worked out a deal with the Carthaginians in the same way the Americans had come to terms with Germany after the war. “Because you can’t get blood out of a stone. You’ve got to get your enemy in debt to you, make them thankful partners, because you can’t feed off yourself surrounded by people entirely alien to you, which is what Rome ended up doing. And you won’t find that in your books.” The class was over. Mr. Beale looked pleased with himself.
He put these difficult questions to Livio every day and sometimes Livio stared and said nothing, not sure what was going on. One day Mr. Beale, throwing open his arms, said, “Livio, you pay attention. Always you listen. You gotta to listen,” and the boys broke into loud laughter. Mr. Beale smiled and patted one of the laughing boys on the back as he walked to the blackboard.
Livio sat rubbing his knuckles, but then he thought about his father who was no longer a stonemason but only a bricklayer, uprooted from a village that had been left behind, broken and empty, and now he was living with his wife and son in a damp basement flat, laying bricks and working like a day labourer, never complaining.
When Mr. Beale went by and tapped Livio on the shoulder, saying, “You do well, Livio, you get better every day,” he sat locked in silence, confused and angry. He remembered a little mute boy everyone in the village had made fun of. His father had told him that there were voices inside the boy, deep inside, and all he had to do was open up the boy’s mouth and put his ear as close as he could and he’d hear them. He’d hear strange old grandfathers whispering. And one day Livio had pried the frightened boy’s mouth open, staring down into the dark gaping hole that smelled so sour he had turned away, surprised as the boy broke into tears, his mouth hanging open. Livio, sitting very straight in his seat, felt like crying, afraid that Mr. Beale might come and force open his mouth. Closing his eyes, Livio drifted off into a dream of village evenings and how he used to amuse his father and the men around the fountain with the little trick muscle in his wrist.
Later in the afternoon, Livio rolled up his sleeve and felt the two little cords that ran down his right wrist. He put a thin dime on the cords, clenching his right fist, slowly turning his wrist. The cords tensed and then a small muscle popped up, the coin flipped over and landed on his wrist. Livio smiled. The boy sitting behind Livio poked him and said, “Hey, do that again.” Livio shook his head. “Come on, I want to see that again.”
Livio put the coin on the cords, clenched his fist, and turned it as the boy leaned forward. Livio, suddenly at ease, laughed with the boy as the coin flipped over.
“What’s going on there?”
Livio slumped down in his seat, but the boy leaned into the aisle and said, “Livio has a trick, sir.”
Mr. Beale, buttoning his jacket, came to their seats.
“Let’s see your trick. What kind of trick?”
Livio shook his head.
“Come on, we your friends. We gotta see everything you canna do.” Mr. Beale turned to the class. “Don’t we, class?”
They all shouted yes and the boy behind Livio pushed him. “Go on, show them.”
Livio looked up and saw Mr. Beale, aloof, stroking his neck, the light on his narrow face from the big window, and Mr. Beale said softly, almost soothingly, “You show us your little trick, eh, Livio?”
Livio put the coin on his wrist. All the boys were watching him. The muscle popped up and the coin flipped over. The class was silent and then someone called out, “Do it again.”
Livio quickly put the coin back on hi
s wrist, but Mr. Beale said no to Livio and wheeled on the class with a wave of his arm. “We don’t a turn thisa room into a circus.” But there was no laughter. “We can’t have this in the middle of class,” he said sternly. “We’ve got work to do.”
“But you said you wanted to see it,” a boy cried out.
Mr. Beale shrugged, as if what had happened was of no consequence because they were all friends and it was over, but Livio suddenly stood up and thrust the coin out at the teacher, who, startled, waved Livio aside. Livio held out the coin to him again.
“You want me to try your little trick?”
Livio nodded and sat down. Mr. Beale rolled up his sleeve and put the coin on his wrist. Clenching his fist, he twisted his wrist back and forth, yet the coin stayed still. He flushed, little blotches of red breaking out in his cheeks as he stood staring at the profile of a sailing ship on the coin, his long arm extended, his hand white. The class started to laugh. Humiliated by the laughter, he tossed the coin into Livio’s lap and went back to his desk, picking up a book and then putting it down. He began to write all the dates of Caesar’s conquests on the blackboard and he told them to memorize them.
When class was over, the boys gathered around Livio. The tallest, Abner Such, who was muscular but usually shy because he wore thick glasses, smacked him on the back and asked him to do the trick again. Livio shuffled, embarrassed. Mr. Beale, trying to be friendly and part of the good feeling, called out, “You don’t want to forget the football game, boys.” No one paid any attention. Livio saw the teacher lift his arm as if to speak, but the boys were all laughing and Mr. Beale sat down. The room cleared and Livio and the teacher were alone.
With a loose smile on his face, Mr. Beale stood up awkwardly, as if wanting to be bigger than Livio. Feeling uncertain for a moment, Livio finally looked up, smiling. “My English pretty good, eh?” he said helpfully. “I think I do pretty good.”
“Very well, you’ve done very well.”
“I think it’s so.”
All the Lonely People Page 29
